Two heatpipes peek from behind the large fan.

                                                          The heatpipes terminate at both sides of the fan. Note the contact point at the middle, and the "floating" position of the whole cooling assembly.

All joking aside, the box doesn’t affect the hardware inside a whit, except to provide more space for the items in its bundle – in this case including a couple of nice surprises in the form of a DVI to HDMI connector, a DVI to VGA connector, and a 6 to 8-pin power converter – especially important as the videocard itself requires an 8-pin power connector instead of the expected (and standard) 6-pin connector. A driver CD and the user’s manual rounds out the bundle.

                                                          The rear.Some specifications are listed on a sticker at the top portion.

The card itself is again a departure from Palit’s usual – instead of the expected gold heatsink and fan assembly, we find a funky-looking black plastic-clad aluminum heatsink with a single fan in the middle. Two heatpipes run from the core and curves back to burrow beneath the fins at both sides of the fan, all very simple and purposeful. If you haven’t worked it out yet, this card is a double slot solution, with the requisite exhaust slits at the rear of the card for escaping heat. This bodes well for the great-performing but somewhat hot-running 4850. Moving around the card we see that everything is at it should be, from the PCI-E 2.0 compatible connector to the dual CrossFireX-capable golden fingers, to the dual DVI connectors and single TV-out at the rear.

                                                           Ignoring convention, the Palit employs an 8-pin power connector.

The only other thing left hanging is the aforementioned 8-pin connector, which presumably is required to ensure a proper power flow for this higher-clocked example. Fortunately, this shouldn’t be a problem with Palit’s inclusion of a6 to 8-pin converter.

                                                            The dual DVI and TV-out connectors are par for the course with this type of card.

Speaking of overclocks, Palit has taken advantage of this Radeon’s inherent scalability by increasing core clocks to 685MHz, up 60MHz from the stock 625MHz. Memory clocks remain the same at 1000MHz (dual pumped to 2000). Re-iterating the 4850’s arsenal of features, we have 512MB of GDDR3 running on a memory bus width of 256 bits, the same 800 shader units, 1 teraflop of compute power, all amped up just a bit more with Palit’s overclock. By how much? Using tests on another pre-overclocked 4850 – the Sapphire Toxic clocked at a lower 675MHz core but with a 1100MHz (2200 effective) memory clock, we can surmise performance to be linearly improved as tested over various benchmarks and games – this is backed up by data from other benchmarks. In 3DMark 06 in particular, we can see consistent increases of up to 400 3DMarks across different resolutions, while Crysis, always a demanding game, exhibits minuscule but still consistent increases of 1 to 3 FPS at different settings ranging from 1024 x 768 4x AA/AF to 1600 x 1200 without AA/AF.

                                                              Our friendly Frobot friend, only he's not looking so friendly in this shot..

The factory-improved 4850s are natural results of an excellent foundation and the company’s need to differentiate themselves from the crowd of videocard makers. Fortunately, the 4850 lends itself beautifully to overclocking, and improved coolers in dual-slot configurations improve the single main negative on the 4850’s feature list – its tendency to run hot. With the release of the Palit HD4850 Sonic, both Palit and AMD are in good position to run circles around the competition – with an all-around good product coming from one of the best AMD/ATI partners.

                                                            The bundled items. Includes a 6 to 8-pin power converter, a DVI to HDMI and a DVI to VGA connector, and the manual and CD-drivers.

                                                            A parting shot.